I will be doing the recording while in 640x480, and am wondering the strain on the system when using the various sizes of windows for the video screen. Apple gives you 3 options, small, medium and fullscreen.

Now in my past experience fullscreen wasn't meant for recording, but iether medium or small does good. Which do your recommend?

And, is there a program out there that will capture the video into MPEG-1 instead of the usual Quicktime? If I use uncompressed Quicktime, it's easy to convert without drastic quality loss but It would be easier to save as raw mpeg-1. I guess it's all about size etc.

Also, because the 840 can do realtime filtering, are there ways to setup these filters? I hear about them but seldom found any info on how to use them. Specifically I want to try and filter out the anomolies and crud that VHS usually shows. (little lines, washed out colors etc.)

Also, will having more ram in the machine and dedicated to the application doing the recording speed things up? I will be having 128mb ram in the machine soon so if i gave the app like 64mb of ram, would it be overkill or would it help out?

I'm a little new to this. So, the ideal way to capture the best quality, space isn't an issue since I will have a drive I can save to, iether networked or local. (Depends)

The filtering and other stuff I can do on my PC that increase image quality...the main idea is getting a presentable source file from the mac that is decent quality etc.

Thanks for all who can help.

If your doing long captures you need a fast scsi drive with alot of room. the videovision works best with a 5mb/sec capture rate at 640x480 compressed (300mb per minute adds up quick). Uncompressed video capture is over 10mb/sec. Both of these cards use Jpeg compression which i believe is different from MPEG in the jpeg can be edited and added to easily because each frame is captured in its entirety while mpeg just stores the changes from the frame before it (mpeg-1 is vcd format while mpeg-2 is dvd format). Correct me please if I am wrong.

There are many porograms out that will allow you to add/remove/edit your video after you capture it.

Capturing analog video to a networked drive is asking for trouble. The built in network on a Q840av only does a little over 1 mb/sec if nothing else is going on, which is too slow for good quality 640x480 capture (the standard 320x200 would probably work but turning that into a good quality VCD or DVD isnt going to happen).

I haven't played around with it much, but besides the things mentioned in my other posts you need to be concerned with 1) size of file 2) maintaining audio sync 3) editing the file. I believe there is a 1.2GB? size limit on recording on a 68K for some reason..though I can't remember what or if that size is correct. Maintaining sync on anything over a few minutes is supposed to be a problem even with the VideoVision I don't know of any Nubus cards that solve this expect possibly the Targa 2000. I know the PCI versions were pretty good at this. I planned on using a newer mac to edit the files captured on the Quadra which means you've got to move them over somehow...network is too slow for anything long. I suppose you could install a CD burner, but then you've got to buy a SCSI burner and I didn't like the idea of wasting a CD just to move a file across the room.

All of the Nubus and most PCI cards I'm aware of use JPEG compression. If you're going to record to VCD or DVD you need to recompress in MPEG1 or MPEG2. I don't know how much time this would take on something that was already JPEG compressed, but I was considering skipping the cheap Nubus cards and buying an Aurora Fuse PCI card which can capture uncompressed video at something like 9 mb/sec. I reconsidered when the owner told me how long it took him to compress the data for burning on his G3.

These issues might not be relavent if you are just capturing a few minutes of video. But I wanted to record full length VHS movies and taped TV shows for transfer to VCD. The best bet for something like that is probably El Gato's Eye TV TV-USB tuner and recorder for MPEG1 recordings. There is also a USB device for capturing MPEG2 via USB but i forget its name. I've kind of put the idea on hold for now, and am waiting to see if/when hardware MPEG4 decoders start to show up. With quality near that of MPEG2 but size closer to MPEG1, it seems like a much simpler route.

Tom

If your really into doing video capture easy get a PC and buy a Radeon All-In-Wonder 8500 or newer, the thing does mpeg1 and mpeg2 compression on the fly in hardware, also does mpeg4 i believe with software (for making divx's). Hell my old matrox rainbow runner worked great at capturing mpeg1 video and the software was smart enough to start a new file after the 2gb file length was reached (win 9x limits).

I just play around with video capture on my macs.

:)

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